Before Bruce Meyers got the idea to rebody a VW Beetle and tear off down the Baja Peninsula in the sucker, guys were building crazy homebrew dune buggies to drive on the beaches of the California coast. One such character was Bob Forgnone, a service-station owner from Salinas, California, land of John Steinbeck and Cole Foster. Forgnone and his pals built their dune buggies from exhaust tubing and used wacky parts like fire-truck air cleaners and Ford FE mills. And as the magnificent Mister Jalopy says of one of Forgnone's early creations, "If I built this exquisite vehicle, I would be so proud I would sleep in the garage with my arms around it."